Zelda (19 page)

The sea turned the color of gunmetal and the cold winds of the mistral blew down from the Alps Estérel. The Fitzgeralds remained on the Riviera while Scott tried to clear everything from his mind but the manuscript of
The Great Gatsby
, which he had nearly completed. He told Maxwell Perkins that it would not reach him before October 1 “as Zelda and I are contemplating a careful revision after a week’s complete rest.” He said the summer had been a fair one. “I’ve been unhappy but my work hasn’t suffered from it. I am grown at last.” That was the only clue he gave to any of his friends at that time of the blow that had been struck at their marriage. At the end of October
Gatsby
was sent to Scribner’s and the Fitzgeralds decided
to follow what little sun there was to Italy. Zelda was reading
Roderick Hudson
and suggested to Scott that they winter in Rome. In November Scott entered in his Ledger: “… ill feeling with Zelda,” but there were no explanatory notes to accompany his comment.

Rome was an unfortunate choice for both of them. It was damp and cold and they were ill intermittently throughout the dreary winter months. Scott disliked the Italians, got in scrapes with the police, and began to drink heavily. Yet, when the proofs of
Gatsby
began to arrive from New York, he worked soberly and in full control as he revised them. He worried about the title of the novel. Should it have been
Trimalchio in West Egg
, the title he’d put on the book; simply
Trimalchio
, or
Gatsby?
He had two alternative titles which he rejected for their lightness:
Gold-hatted Gatsby
and
The High-bouncing Lover.
But Zelda preferred
The Great Gatsby
and he trusted her instinct.

She read aloud to him from a novel by Will James about cowboys, in order, he said, to spare his mind, and when he had difficulty visualizing Gatsby, she drew pictures until her fingers ached, attempting to capture his image for Scott. The result was, he wrote Perkins, “I know Gatsby better than I know my own child.”

By the first of the new year they set off for Capri to recuperate. Zelda became ill with colitis and her attacks were painful. They were to come and go fitfully during the entire year and made them both anxious over her health. The ailment came on the heels of her failed love affair and there was probably a connection between the two. It was in Capri that Zelda first began to paint; it was to become a lifelong pursuit. Scott wrote, “… me drinking,” while he assured John Peale Bishop: “Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four-day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.”

In April they traveled back to southern France in their Renault; its top had been damaged and was removed at Zelda’s insistence, for she preferred open cars. When the car broke down in Lyon they abandoned it and continued on to Paris by train. That spring in Paris was composed for them of “1000 parties and no work,” but they did meet Ernest Hemingway.

The previous fall, Fitzgerald, upon reading something of Hemingway’s in the
transatlantic review
, predicted to Perkins that
he had “a brilliant future…. He’s the real thing.” Meeting him in Paris, Scott took to Hemingway immediately; he liked his tough-guy charm, his engaging lopsided grin. Ernest Hemingway was three years younger than Scott and a half foot taller. There was an athletic swagger to his walk; he wore a mustache and swore in cliché French. “Parbleu!” and “Yes, we have no bananas!” were his favorite expressions. Soon Hemingway was calling Scott his best friend and a guy he liked to talk to most of the time.

Shortly after they met, Scott invited Hemingway to join him in a trip to Lyon to pick up the Fitzgeralds’ abandoned Renault. It was on the two-day trip that Scott first told Hemingway about Zelda’s romance with Jozan. Less than ten months had passed since the crisis in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. According to Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir,
A Moveable Feast
, on their return from Lyon Scott tried to put a call through to Zelda in Paris. While waiting for the call he and Hemingway had several drinks and Scott began to talk about his life with Zelda. It was then that he revealed what Hemingway said “was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story.” He was later in the same book to remark that during the course of his friendship with Scott the story of Zelda’s romance was told several times, and altered with each retelling. Hemingway said he heard about it so often that he could picture the tragic romance (it became increasingly tragic as Scott repeated it) in his mind’s eye. But this first time Scott was at pains to tell Hemingway everything about it—how it had disturbed him, and exactly what had happened.

Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, to whom he was married when he met the Fitzgeralds in 1925, remembers the Fitzgeralds’ joint recital of Zelda’s romance. She says: “It was one of their acts together. I remember Zelda’s beautiful face becoming very, very solemn, and she would say how he had loved her and how hopeless it had been and then how he had committed suicide.” That last detail was only one of the dramatic embellishments added to give the affair tragic significance. Hadley continued: “Scott would stand next to her looking very pale and distressed and sharing every minute of it. Somehow it struck me as something that gave her status. I can still see both of them standing together telling me about the suicide of Zelda’s lover. It created a peculiar effect.”

Scott had helped to fictionalize the affair, thereby giving it a heightened meaning and value, which he, having created, could come to share. It was all of a piece with his having married the heroine
of his stories and novels; of his feeling, which by this time, dangerously, had become
their
feeling, that he somehow possessed a right to Zelda’s life as his raw material.

Hemingway perceptively noticed two kinds of jealousy in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. Zelda was jealous, he said, of Scott’s work while Scott was jealous of Zelda. Zelda tried to keep Scott from writing, and Scott tried to keep Zelda from other people. Instinctively Zelda realized that a part of her attractiveness for Scott lay in her ability to provoke his jealousy, but that in no way mitigated her own. It might, in fact, have created a tension within her to maintain that ability, especially since it was something she could not wholly understand or control.

Hadley feels that Zelda “was a charming, lovely creature. She lived on what Ernest called the ‘festival conception of life.’ “She believes that Zelda was essentially “a frivolous kind of woman.” There were from the start problems between the two couples. Hadley says: “They were inconvenient friends. They would call on the Hemingways at four o’clock in the morning and we had a baby and didn’t appreciate it very much. When Scott wrote I don’t know.”

Their writing was what drew the two men into friendship, and Scott eventually succeeded in having Scribner’s take on the as yet largely unknown Hemingway. But it was never Hemingway’s considerable talent alone that attracted Scott to him. There was a purity about Hemingway then, a dedication to his art, a seemingly total lack of affectation that impressed Scott as it had others. And Hemingway, by his own admittance, was curious about Fitzgerald, the best-selling author, the writer of
The Great Gatsby.

Gatsby
, which was published in April, 1925, was a critical rather than a financial success. In the first week of its publication Perkins cabled Scott in Marseille that the reviews were superb, but the sales uncertain. When Scott had finished it he had written John Peale Bishop that “my book has something extraordinary about it. I want to be extravagantly admired again.” Fitzgerald had decided that
Gatsby
must sell seventy-five thousand copies, and he was depressed by Perkins’s wire. He told Perkins: “In all events I have a book of good stories for the fall. Now I shall write some cheap ones until I’ve accumulated enough for my next novel.” If that collection did not succeed, “I’m going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity. Anyhow there’s no point in
trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it….” The reviews which he saw irritated him.

Then Gilbert Seldes reviewed it intelligently and sensitively in
The Dial:
“Fitzgerald has more than matured, he has mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight, leaving behind him everything dubious and tricky in his earlier work, and leaving even farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his elders.” In May Gertrude Stein wrote Scott: “You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in
Pendennis
and
Vanity Fair
and this isn’t a bad compliment.” In June Fitzgerald learned that the dramatic rights to
Gatsby
were being sold and his financial worries were for the moment in abeyance. Although
Gatsby
sold less than twenty-five thousand copies, the personal letters Scott received about it from people like Wilson and Stein and especially T. S. Eliot made him rightly proud of his achievement. Eliot wrote him, “… it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James….”

Hemingway and Fitzgerald were then “very thick” and they saw a lot of each other. Neither Zelda nor Hadley was included in their literary discussions, but met on a more purely social level, as the wives of writers. Zelda seemed to Hadley a canny woman, and she recalls Zelda saying with a smile, “‘I notice that in the Hemingway family you do what Ernest wants.’ Ernest didn’t like that much, but it was a perceptive remark. He had a passionate, overwhelming desire to do some of the things that have since been written about, and so I went along with him—with the trips, the adventures. He had such a powerful personality; he could be so enthusiastic that I became caught up in the notions too. It could work in reverse, that persistence. Once he took a dislike to someone you could absolutely never get him back [to them]. If he took exception to anyone, that was it; there was no reasoning with him about it. He eventually turned on almost everyone we knew, all his old friends.”

In an anecdote which has become a part of the Fitzgerald-Hemingway canon, Ernest upon meeting Zelda for the first time is supposed to have drawn Scott aside and told him that Zelda was crazy. Zelda’s reaction to Hemingway on the other hand was no more complimentary, for she considered him “bogus.” Scott had hoped that Zelda would be as taken with Ernest as he himself was, and he was both puzzled and disappointed in their mutual distrust.

“At that time,” Gerald Murphy said, “the word [bogus] just didn’t seem to fit; there wasn’t anyone more real and more himself than Ernest. Bogus, Ernest? Of course, who knows how right she may prove to be?”

Hadley did not remember Ernest saying that Zelda impressed him as crazy, but he may, of course, have told only Scott. She said: “The portrait of Zelda—of both of them—in
A Moveable Feast
seemed quite brutal. But Ernest could be brutal. Zelda and he didn’t take to each other. He was too assured a male for her. Maybe she caught this and resented it…. He was then the kind of man to whom men, women, children, and dogs were attracted. It was something.”

In August the Fitzgeralds left Paris for Antibes. They returned to the South of France because, as Scott wrote, “One could get away with more on the summer Riviera, and whatever happened seemed to have something to do with art.” They were to spend only a month there, but it was a month marred by a chilling episode.

The Fitzgeralds joined the Murphys one evening for dinner at an inn located at St.-Paul-de-Vence in the mountains above Nice. Its dining terrace was built about two hundred feet above the valley and there was a sheer drop from the outer walls of the terrace. Gerald Murphy took a seat with his back to the parapet and a series of ten stone steps. It was perhaps ten o’clock and they had just finished their meal. The only lights other than those that ringed the harbor like a necklace across the Bay of Angels were two candles on their table. At a nearby table sat Isadora Duncan surrounded by three admirers. Gerald Murphy said: “Scott didn’t know who she was, so I told him. He immediately went to her table and sat at her feet. She ran her fingers through his hair and she called him her centurion. But she was, you see, an old lady [she was 46] by this time. Her hair was red, no, purple really—the color of her dress—and she was quite heavy.”

Zelda was quietly watching Scott and Duncan together and then suddenly, with no word of warning or explanation, she stood up on her chair and leaped across both Gerald and the table into the darkness of the stairwell behind him. “I was sure she was dead. We were all stunned and motionless.” Zelda reappeared within moments, standing perfectly still at the top of the stone stairs. Sara ran to her and wiped the blood from her knees and dress. Gerald said, “I don’t remember what Scott did. The first thing I remember thinking was
that it had not been ugly. I said that to myself over and over again. I’ve never been able to forget it.”
^*

An incident such as this, so obviously self-destructive and shot through with gratuitous violence, was to blight subsequent meetings between the Murphys and Fitzgeralds. “You see,” Gerald Murphy commented, “they didn’t want ordinary pleasures, they hardly noticed good food or wines, but they did want something to happen.” It was as though the Fitzgeralds were straining for some definite mode of action that they barely understood, or, not needing to understand, acted out. Their code, which was never simply the hedonistic one of the twenties, had begun to make demands upon them.

In September Scott summarized the year: “Futile, shameful useless but [for] the $30,000 rewards of 1924 work. Self disgust. Health gone.” It got no better in Paris that winter. Their apartment, which was near the Etoile, had little charm and Zelda took no interest in decorating it or in preparing meals. It was a damp and cheerless place on the rue de Tilsit, a five-flight walk-up with faded gold-and-purple wallpaper. Its air of former elegance accented its current dilapidation and neglect. In January Zelda’s colitis again flared up and they decided to rest at Salies-de-Béarn, a small town in the Pyrénées, where Zelda took the cure. She wrote: “We had a play on Broadway and the movies offered $60,000, but we were china people by then and it didn’t seem to matter particularly.”